Expert Talk in Medical Contexts: Explicit and Implicit Orientation to Risks

Abstract

In medical contexts, parties often have reasons to focus on risks: risks of developing diseases or of having children with congenital diseases, risks involved in taking drugs or in using a particular type of therapy, and so forth. In such risk-implicative contexts, doctors and nurses deal with the risk topics sometimes directly, at other times quite indirectly. In this article, we discuss results from studying 5 different health care contexts. We discuss contextual factors that might account for some of the considerable differences in risk talk. Our claim is that the different explicit versus implicit orientations are linked to where and how the different health care experts position themselvesvis-á-vis scientific risk formulations and everyday risk perceptions. Our data on the implicit orientations to risk cast doubt on theories of discourse that would hold that all relevant understandings in discourse are made verbally manifest.